Ryan Reynolds opens up about his late father’s hallucinations from Parkinson’s
Reynolds tells PEOPLE that his family had crucial answers after discovering the lesser-known signs of Parkinson’s disease.
When Ryan Reynolds’ father, former police officer James Chester Reynolds, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he was 22 years old. However, their Vancouver family hardly ever talked about it.
As far as I can tell, he said the phrase “Parkinson’s” maybe three times, and one of those mentions wasn’t to me. Reynolds’ father passed away in 2015 at the age of 74 from the sickness he had been fighting for almost 20 years.
“There was a ton of denial, a ton of hiding,” she adds. The two had a difficult connection that was made worse by the Deadpool and Wolverine actor’s later discovery that his father had battled delusions and hallucinations, two less common signs of Parkinson’s disease that started about.
“I didn’t really know what was going on, so it really destabilized my relationship with him,” says Ryan, who is involved with the educational campaign More to Parkinson’s, which provides tools for patients and caregivers.
The youngest of four brothers, Ryan, 47, welcomed his own four children—James, 9, Inez, 7, Betty, 4, and Olin, 1—with his wife, 36-year-old Blake Lively, nine years after the loss of his father. In this week’s edition of People, he shares with them his insights about parenting and the knowledge he has received about Parkinson’s disease.
I must state up front that my father was a man who did not have the same emotions as him. He was a cop, a boxer, and a rough man. I honestly can’t even remember ever
